The rich will never have enough money and we will all suffer to that end.

It never is. It’s the same everywhere too.

I once read on the Internet if you’re dependant on income you are poor. I think that is a perfect definition, because it removes the rivalry between all, well, slaves.

By money count I am possibly rich in direct comparison to you. Yet here I am, requiring income for my family and me to survive alone, additionally being bound by long term costs.

So it’s basically the same for all of us (albeit with different numbers and different conditions) except for a handful who can do what they want.

If you’re interested in details in my case hit me up by pm.

Epicureanism teaches that you will never have enough money, enough fame, enough influence, so chasing after those will never make you happy. Instead, you should focus on fulfilling your needs and fixing problems in your life, getting enough to eat, enough sleep, surrounding yourself with friends and enjoying the small things in life. When you’re unburdened by needs, you reach long-lasting happiness.

So to me, that means earning enough to fulfill your needs is enough, especially if you don’t have to worry about losing your job any time soon

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I think “enough” is when you don’t have to worry about water, food and shelter.

I have roughly enough to pay for these things, a little more, can get internet and a few euros each month for random luxury stuff.

I earned more before, but I reduced the hours in my job severely so I get to this money state. I like the reduced hours more than having more money.

So yeah for me, idk what everyone’s talking about, there’s definitely an “enough”. Of course, more is also “nice” but “enough” is when you survive with a little bit over.

Of course, like others say, for most people there is not an “enough”, they keep wanting more. It depends on the individuals. I have a bunch of friends who are friends because they think like me. But I can’t be friends with most of the population because they can’t get enough.

Famous people are mostly famous exactly because they can’t get enough. No one works that much, tries to acquire status that much, if they are satisfied eventually. Because when you would be satisfied, you stop chasing more fame, not getting to a level that we would call “famous”.

IMO: Not having to worry about money.
Bonus points if you could easily absorb being jobless for 1-2 years while not making any compromises.

Greedy people are more likely to end up wealthy. Greedy people are also more likely to end up doing ethically dubious things.

Of course, any wealth at all is unethical if you’re being honest with yourself. There’s a famous passage in the Bible.

Jesus was out teaching his disciples or healing people- whatever he did. And a rich man comes up to him and asks

“Jesus, I want to follow you and go to heaven. Please tell me what I should do”

What did Jesus say? Jesus told him to a) sell all of his shit b) give that money to charity c) physically follow me around

What did rich guy do? Have an epiphany about morality and living the good life?

No, he cried. He cried because he didn’t actually want to let go of the good things he had for morality.

All of us in first world nations are guilty of this to some extent. The way our world is shaped you essentially have to be unethical to survive. There are levels to it, of course. But I think your perspective is too black and white and needs a little nuance. Seem like a teenager.

I think acquiring money can be an addiction, in the sense that it’s a behavior that allows escape (it’s a simple goal that’s easy to define, allowing a person to stop looking around and just go forward). Just like video games provide an orienting direction, hence provide dopamine, hence can be addicting, money can do the same thing.

Because money is a number, it’s inherently gamified. You can just set “more money” as the objective and you never have to change it and it’s always a direction to go that can produce dopamine.

Now, if it’s not the best, most meaningful direction. the dopamine flow decreases but doesn’t stop. Just like the video games getting boring, or your brain adapting to the cigarettes or cocaine. You still get a little jolt of dopamine, but not as much as before, so it’s this tired, boring life.

The thing is, there’s a lot of uncertainty and withdrawal and relearning you have to go through to get away from the repetitive small-hit dopamine cycle and into the more organic, less repetitive, large-hit dopamine cycle of … being a real person doing valuable things.

So yeah. Money as addiction. Source of small dopamine hits, that are easier to obtain and more familiar and hence comfortable, than the messy and uncertain process of seeking dopamine through real-world accomplishment.

ALSO, there’s the problem of how markets work. When a person is relative low in the market structure, their only way of getting profit is to really produce a lot of value. The higher a person gets in that structure, ie the more they advance financially, the less value they’re adding. The ultimate asymptote they approach is when they have sufficient money to live on the interest, and it’s totally automatic, and their contribution to economic value is zero.

This means that as a person follows the path (one of many paths) from worker to entrepreneur to pretty bourgeoise to elite, they steadily lose the natural, organic meaning that comes from actually providing value to others.

The person who used to love and be sustained by the smiles and appreciation of their coffee customers, probably isn’t getting much juice out of sitting there looking at spreadsheets of their 5000-coffee-shop empire.

But along the way, they’ve already switched their dopamine source to be from a combination of value provided and money received, to be just the money.

Which is like sitting there lighting up a cigarette to stave off the discomfort for another hour, or to prevent having to think about something that makes you anxious or uncertain. Just light up a smoke: dopamine.

Just like me with this damn website. Addicted. Small dopamine hits, comfortable stand-in for actual meaning.

I don’t think any amount of money is enough. This is what happens when we live in a society that relies on material wealth as a source of validation instead of a means to fulfill our basic needs.

When I am immune to the thoughts of questioning my finances

I think the only way to have “enough” money is to practice gratitude. Being poor is defined by stress, of course; I am not gonna tell you that your problems are all in your head. But when you get a better paying job, it’s easy to thoughtlessly spend more money and still end up feeling poor. So, don’t just excitedly spend all that money. Take a good look at what you appreciate about your current life and what you are proud of, and do what you need to cultivate these good things. Sometimes it is surprising how many of those things are free. Sometimes they need a bit of money to grow.

The other thing is that each time you cross a moral line, it gets easier to do so again. This is why i do not drink and will never drink. I think the same goes for accepting sponsorships from tobacco companies and other kinds of corruption. And of course being rich naturally shields you from the consequences of these decisions if you let it.

It’s harder to think about “enough” in places like India (or even the US) where there is so much inequality.

But I would define “enough” as comfortable. Not worried about bills, buying whatever groceries you want, a good living situation and enough cushion that an emergency won’t make you homeless.

The addiction to more, more, more is a disorder like hoarding is.

In a sense, money represents all the future goods and services it can buy, and those goods and services ultimately resolve down to someone’s time and effort. Money was conceived as a formalization of IOU’s, after all.

So it’s similar to asking whether there’s a limit to how much time and effort from (i.e. influence over) others one would want.

I have wondered the same thing many a time. I don’t think it’s naive to wonder honestly. I find it genuinely confusing, not from a moral judgy standpoint but more of an effort to reward standpoint.

If you or I sold tobacco in exchange for a quantity we’ll call a “shit-tonne” for the purposes of discussion. It would change our lives considerably. As you said, you personally would do it, and I think odds are pretty good I would too. But if that 1 shit-tonne of cash doesn’t significantly change the recipient’s life or capabilities or long term security, I don’t understand why they’d bother with it. I think my confusion diverges from yours in so far as I don’t think the point of getting rich for the vast majority of people has to do with acquiring the luxury of a moral compass. It might be for some, but I’d say for most it’s at best a side benefit and for many irrelevant. However I do think that most of us without the requisite shit-tonnes of cash like to imagine the purpose for acquiring it is to avoid having to expend the effort required to acquire anymore thereafter. In this framework, which seems so obvious and relatable to me, you’d think you couldn’t hook wealthy actors in to shilling tobacco because basically, they just couldn’t be bothered, I mean why bother? You might keep acting if you find it fun but surely there’d be funner gigs than ads?

This is a more cynical way to look at it, but no less inaccurate than your theory of acquiring wealth to buy the ability to be moral. In the case of wealthy actors however, I think they’re maybe not the best example, the richest ones are very rich but their material desires are sometimes able to scale with their wealth. Nicholas Cage was a good example as he managed to get himself in to ridiculous debt ostensibly from insane spending on ridiculous things. Presumably he liked having those things and was able with some effort to actually spend enough outpace his unbelievably high earnings. In that context you might well take lucrative acting gigs for scummy companies to help you out of debt or to help you buy one more private island.

There’s a whole other tier of offensive and obscene personal wealth where you see people like billionaire CEOs. These people trash my model of the ‘purpose’ of acquiring wealth and by the actions we see them do, yours as well. These guys probably couldn’t spend all their money on material objects if they actively tried. Their motives are very obscure to me. I definitely judge these guys but I leave them just a little bit of slack in so far as it seems generally observable that acquiring this much wealth seems to make you want to keep acquiring more wealth. I may not know why, but it almost seems like some kind of a fundamental law or drive so it could almost have some exculpatory power, though not much and in any case would only lend credence to the idea that society as a whole ought to avoid the accumulation of quite so much personao wealth since if my observation is at all accurate it would tend to mean, that much like we hold it to be true that all drivers will be impaired after a certain amount of alcohol so too does wealth tend to corrupt the decision making and motivations of people who have too much of it.

I’ve read about the topic a little bit and there’s some concepts that make some sense. People do crave purpose, so if you make enough money to sit on your ass and avoid having to make money people have a tendency to create objectives for themselves to work towards and if they don’t it can lead to unhappiness. In the case of some of those who achieved such wealth they had such objectives on the way up too, so it’s how they’ve always lived their life (theoretically, if they supposedly got their through hard work and merit, big if). This does explain it I guess, but as an explanation it feels vague and weak. I’ve heard ideas around a kind of competitive peer pressure effect too, these guys want to be richer than each other. This is unsatisfying because it’s just so dumb but makes a lot of sense, especially because it kind of scales with wealth as well. Often as people at all walks of life take stock of their position they will assess how well they’re doing in comparison to where they were before and also in comparison to someone else around them so by those metrics you’re always going to want to be doing just that little bit better than a few years ago and your always going to want to be exceeding or approaching the person you’ve most recently set as a desirable standard. All of these ideas seem to explain the behaviour we see but to me all feel too wishy washy to really make sense but I guess that’s because it’s going to be lots of these drives acting in concert along with something that one probably just has to experience and which basically none of us ever will as it comes with becoming richer than god.

Personally I can’t but think that if instead of becoming rich, I suddenly got bequeathed all of Elon Musk’s wealth unexpectedly from his timely death then I’d very likely have far less ambitious and contentious goals than he. Not necessarily because I hold myself to a higher standard but because, I mean, why take over the world like a megalomaniac when it’s so much easier and more fun to do lots of drugs and go traveling and play with all the best toys? If I really crave purpose I can make a movie or something, I wouldn’t even have to be good at it, I could buy everything related to it being made and distributed. If I was talentless and it stunk and flopped, it wouldn’t be my problem and I could afford to spend my time getting good at it as a hobby even if each flop cost hundreds of millions. But maybe one the zeros started trailing on my account balance I’d suddenly start wanting to own everything and influence politics and just generally being a bit of a prick, it seems to happen to people.

About 20% more than what anybody currently has at any point in time